Cultivating Resilience in Families Who Foster: Understanding How Families Cope and Adapt Over Time

Abstract

Families who foster offer essential care for children and youth when their own parents are unable to provide for their safety and well-being. Foster caregivers face many challenges including increased workload, emotional distress, and the difficulties associated with health and mental health problems that are more common in children in foster care. Despite these stressors, many families are able to sustain fostering while maintaining or enhancing functioning of their unit. This qualitative study applied an adaptational process model of family resilience that emerged in previous studies to examine narratives of persistent, long-term, and multiple fostering experiences. Data corroborated previous research in two ways. Family resilience was again described as a transactional process of coping and adaptation that evolves over time. This process was cultivated through the activation of 10 family strengths that are important in different ways, during varied phases.

An ecological systems approach to understanding social support in foster family resilience

“…In the initial study (Lietz et al . ), 10 strengths emerged as important to a family's capacity to overcome challenges of fostering. Of these 10, social support was discussed with the greatest frequency, and it was in many cases appraised as most important for a family unit to cope and adapt to the stressors associated with fostering.…”

“…Support can be reciprocal, based on support received from others as well as the value placed in providing social support to others (Lietz et al . ). Positive relationships between foster parents and service providers contribute to overall foster parent satisfaction and placement success (Brown ; Denby et al .…”

“…Previous research with foster families has identified social and emotional supports as critical to their satisfaction and continued fostering (Geiger et al 2013;MacGregor et al 2006). Support can be reciprocal, based on support received from others as well as the value placed in providing social support to others (Lietz et al 2016). Positive relationships between foster parents and service providers contribute to overall foster parent satisfaction and placement success (Brown 2008;Denby et al 1999;Farmer et al 2005); however, few studies have investigated the interplay of varying levels of social support and how that impacts resilience in foster families.…”

Editorial: Family Resilience

“…In a companion paper, Saltzman () describes the core principles and methods in the FOCUS intervention, which has been applied extensively with families dealing with trauma and loss. Lietz, Julien‐Chinn, Geiger, and Hayes Piel (), extending previous research on family resilience processes, present their qualitative study of families that provide foster care, elucidating the strengths they report as most important in their resilience at different phases in coping and adaptation over time. Waldegrave et al.…”

Editorial: Emerging Principles of Practice in Couple and Family therapy

“…These methods are, of course, applied within specific treatments in particular ways, but these concepts and methods are also readily exported into the integrative method of the practitioner. And, finally, there is the vast underlying base of knowledge about relational life from which all effective practice draws, including the myriad of empirical findings that we catalog in this journal about family life that is so essential to effective practice [the wide range of such findings includes such diverse information as understanding the impact of partner affairs (Whisman, ), the ways in which resilience occurs (Lietz, Julien‐Chinn, Geiger, & Hayes Piel, ; Walsh, ), the impact of ambiguous loss (Solheim, Zaid, & Ballard, ), the nature of LGBTQ issues in families (Green & Mitchell, ), the impact of various cultural contexts on families (Killoren, Wheeler, Updegraff, Rodríguez de Jésus, & McHale, ; Updegraff & Umaña‐Taylor, ), and relational assessment (Hamilton, Carr, Cahill, Cassells, & Hartnett, ; Heyman, Slep, & Foran, ; Wamboldt, Cordaro, & Clarke, )].…”